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columbia journalism review
'Potentially Ominous Trend' for Press Freedom as Trump Wages Legal War on News Outlets
"Governments and powerful figures threatening journalists and media outlets with costly legal battles and bankruptcy is a common tactic against press freedom in repressive countries," said one journalist.
Nov 15, 2024
"The press freedom fire is at our door step now," said one Washington Post journalist on Thursday night after news broke that two months before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office, he has already begun to wage legal warfare against on the news media.
The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR)reported that days before the election, a lawyer for Trump, Edward Andrew Paltzik, sent a letter to The New York Times and Penguin Random House demanding $10 billion in damages for publishing articles and a book that were critical of the president-elect, who was convicted of 34 felony counts earlier this year.
Trump's legal team took issue with a book by Times journalists Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner titled Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success. They also said they were demanding damages over "false and defamatory statements" in the October 20 article "For Trump, a Lifetime of Scandals Heads Toward a Moment of Judgment" by Peter Baker and the October 22 piece "As Election Nears, Kelly Warns Trump Would Rule Like a Dictator" by Michael Schmidt.
The former article covered numerous wrongdoings by the president-elect and accusations against him, pointing out that he "is the only president in American history impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, the only president ever indicted on criminal charges, and the only president to be convicted of a felony (34, in fact)," and that he has also boasted about sexually assaulting women and spearheaded numerous businesses that went bankrupt.
The latter article detailed comments by Trump's former chief of staff, John Kelly, who told the Times that the definition of fascism accurately describes Trump.
The president-elect himself said while campaigning that he planned to govern as a dictator only on "Day One" of his term in office.
"Governments and powerful figures threatening journalists and media outlets with costly legal battles and bankruptcy is a common tactic against press freedom in repressive countries."
Paltzik told the newspaper that the articles demonstrate the Times' "intention of defaming and disparaging the world-renowned Trump brand that consumers have long associated with excellence, luxury, and success in entertainment, hospitality, and real estate, among many other industries, as well as falsely and maliciously defaming and disparaging him as a candidate for the highest office in the United States."
The CJR reported that the Times responded to Paltzik's letter, telling him the newspaper stood by its reporting on Trump.
As Barry Malone, deputy editor-in-chief of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, said on social media on Friday, Trump's legal threats may be designed not to actually win billions of dollars in damages but "to tie the media up with time-consuming and often prohibitively expensive cases."
The Times and Penguin Random House threats were reported two weeks after Trump suedCBS News for another $10 billion, claiming an interview with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost the November 5 election, was unfairly edited to present her in a positive light and qualified as "election interference."
CBS said it would "vigorously defend" its journalistic practices and called the lawsuit "completely without merit"—a similar response to the one by The Washington Post, which was accused by Trump on the same day of making an illegal in-kind donation to Harris.
Anne Champion, an attorney who has represented several journalists and CNN in legal cases initiated by Trump, told the CJR that the legal threats will likely have "a mental chilling effect" on reporters and news outlets in the United States as Trump prepares to take office.
"It is both conscious and unconscious," said Champion. "Journalists at smaller outlets know very well that the costs for their organization to defend themselves could mean bankruptcy. Even journalists at larger outlets don't want to burden themselves or their employees with lawsuits. It puts another layer of influence into the journalistic process."
Trump has a longstanding disdain for the media, saying numerous times during his first term that journalists were the "enemy of the people." During one campaign rally just before the election he said he wouldn't "mind" if reporters at the event were shot, and he called the media the "enemy camp" during his victory speech last week.
During his first term he also threatened to "take a strong look at our country's libel laws"—which are actually controlled by states, not the federal government—and ensure that "when somebody says something that is false and defamatory about someone, that person will have meaningful recourse in our courts."
The American Civil Liberties Union pointed out at the time that the First Amendment and the lack of federal libel laws would stand in Trump's way, but on Thursday Lachlan Cartwright wrote at CJR that "the drumbeat of legal threats signals a potentially ominous trend for journalists during Trump's second term in office."
As Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah noted on the social media platform Bluesky, "governments and powerful figures threatening journalists and media outlets with costly legal battles and bankruptcy is a common tactic against press freedom in repressive countries."
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'This Is Cowardice': Billionaire Owner Jeff Bezos Stops Washington Post From Endorsing Harris
"What an insult to those of us who have literally put our careers and lives on the line to call out threats to human rights and democracy."
Oct 25, 2024
The publisher of The Washington Postannounced Friday that the paper wouldn't make an endorsement in the U.S. presidential race, with its newsroom reporting that the decision was made by billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, who intervened to stop a drafted endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.
Publisher William Lewis wrote that the paper would return to its "roots" of not endorsing presidential candidates, which the paper didn't do regularly until 1976. The decision came days after the Los Angeles Times owner, the billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, also reportedly blocked a planned endorsement of Harris.
The Washington Post Guild, a union, condemned Bezos' decision in a statement on social media, arguing that it was an abdication of responsibility and suggesting that "management interfered with our members in editorial."
Karen Attiah, a Post columnist, called the decision an "an absolute stab in the back," writing on social media.
"What an insult to those of us who have literally put our careers and lives on the line to call out threats to human rights and democracy," she wrote.
Martin "Marty" Baron, a former executive editor at the Post who was lauded for his leadership of the paper from 2012 to 2021, also denounced the decision not to endorse a presidential candidate.
"This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. Donald Trump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner Jeff Bezos (and others)," he wrote on social media. "Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage."
On political endorsement https://t.co/e5OTZhylIE
This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. @realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.
— Marty Baron (@PostBaron) October 25, 2024
The Post has endorsed the Democratic nominee for president in every race since 1976, aside from 1988, when it made no endorsement. The Los Angeles Times didn't issue endorsements for decades but has endorsed the Democrat in each of the past four presidential elections, starting in 2008.
Lewis said the Post would no longer make presidential endorsements and emphasized its commitment to independent, nonpartisan news. He cited editorial board decisions not to endorse in 1960 and 1972, which gave similar rationales.
Lewis was previously the publisher at The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by right-wing billionaire Rupert Murdoch. Lewis' tenure at the Post, which began last year, has been plagued by controversy.
The reasons for Bezos' reported intervention to stop a planned Harris endorsement are not clear, but he has told the paper's leaders that he would like them to seek out more conservative readers and add more conservative opinion columnists, according toThe New York Times.
Some observers have suggested that Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Soon-Shiong, a biotech mogul, are afraid to antagonize Trump for fear he could retaliate against their businesses when in office.
"The most serious allegation... is that Soon-Shiong and Bezos are trying to hedge their bets out of fear that their business interests could be harmed during a second Trump presidency," Columbia Journalism Review's Sewall Chan, who has worked at both the Post and the Los Angeles Times, wrote on Friday.
"Soon-Shiong, who made his fortune as a biopharmaceutical innovator, is working on new drugs that would presumably require FDA approval," Chan continued. "Amazon faces an antitrust lawsuit, brought last year by the Biden administration, that will take years to litigate or settle."
Robert Kagan, a neoconservative columnist and editor at large at the Post, resigned in protest on Friday, Semaforreported, while suggesting there may be further resignations.
"People are shocked, furious, surprised," an unnamed editorial board member told Semafor about the endorsement decision. "If you don't have the balls to own a newspaper, don't."
Other major newspapers have endorsed Harris, includingThe Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday—with the reminder that "the road to the White House may well run through Pennsylvania and every vote matters." Will Bunch, a columnist at the paper, wrote on social media that "unlike some other news organizations, we will not be silenced, not when everything is on the line for democracy."
The New York Times endorsed Harris on September 30, calling Trump "morally unfit" and "temperamentally unfit" for office.
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Only Public Funding Can Save Local Journalism--and Thus Democracy
Under our plan—the foundation of the new Local Journalism Initiative—policymakers in Washington would provide a lump sum to every county in the nation annually based on the county’s population to pay for nonprofit journalism within that county.
Dec 01, 2021
Readers of the Columbia Journalism Review are well aware of the importance of local news media; they have been the foundation of the American free press, and political democracy, since 1776. Daily newspapers have traditionally constituted the heart and soul of local news media, and they have provided the lion's share of original reporting upon which all other news media depend. That remains the case in the digital era as much of newspapering has transitioned online.
We need the funding to support independent, competitive, professional local news media. That money must come from the government.
CJR readers are also aware that local journalism as it has been known for 200 years has all but disappeared in most places in the United States over the past two decades. The business model for commercial journalism, based on advertising providing most of the income, is dead. Thanks to the internet, it will never return. All efforts to find a viable new business model for local journalism have failed, and investors have abandoned the field, except for private-equity funds on the lookout for distressed properties they can strip for parts.
The ramifications are increasingly clear, and endlessly depressing. It is not simply that functional self-government is impossible without credible journalism with all that forebodes; it is that local newspapers have provided the social glue that brought communities to life, as places where people see themselves as participating in a joint enterprise with people they know and understand and care about. That is disintegrating.
What remains less appreciated is that the founders of the United States regarded creating a free press a policy issue of the greatest possible importance. The Post Office was established in large part to distribute all newspapers virtually for free, and that is most of what it did the first century of this nation's existence. Likewise, that has been the opinion of the Supreme Court in its major decisions. As Justice Potter Stewart put it, the free press clause of the First Amendment is "a structural provision of the constitution." [his emphasis]
This is the public policy imperative facing the United States regarding journalism in 2021: We need the funding to support independent, competitive, professional local news media. That money must come from the government. It is the only viable option at a point when the market has shown that it cannot begin to sustain existing media, let alone usher in a renewal of bold speak-truth-to-power journalism. Of course, we cannot allow the government to pick and choose who gets the money, or engage in censorship. Any viable policy to support local journalism must allow the people to make of it what they will, and trust them in the process of self-government. It is time to stop pretending that can be done without public funding.
How best can the federal government intervene to produce these outcomes? The answer we provide herein is what we term the Local Journalism Initiative. Under our plan, policymakers in Washington would provide a lump sum to every county in the nation annually based on the county's population to pay for nonprofit journalism within that county.
Once every three years, people over 18 will be given three "votes" on how the county's funds should be distributed to three different LJI candidates based in their county. Why three votes for each person? A main objective of the LJI is to have multiple well-funded news media in every county, so people should get multiple votes. In lightly populated rural areas, several counties can be merged to generate a sufficient population base. Conversely in large metropolitan areas counties can be merged if the residents of the counties so desire. In the most populous counties people may get four or five or votes to guarantee diversity of voices.
How the money will be allocated will be determined by people in each county for qualified applicants. To be a qualified applicant for LJI funds, an enterprise must:
- Be formally identified and understood as non-profit
- Be functioning for six months prior to the election, so voters can see what the applicant actually does
- Be based in the home county with 75 percent of its salaries going to employees based in the home county
- Be completely independent; not a subsidiary of a larger nonprofit group
- Produce and publish original material at least five days per week on its website
Those candidates getting the most votes get a higher percentage of their county's LJI budget. No single applicant can get more than 25 percent of a county's annual budget, regardless of its vote total. An applicant must get at least 1 percent of the vote to qualify, or 0.5 percent of the vote in counties with over 1 million people. Diversity and competition are crucial.
Everything produced by federal funds must be made available immediately to everyone online and for free. In short, the principle is that journalistic organizations will be paid in advance, and what they produce primarily with public monies will be instantly put in the public domain and made available to all for free. The best check on abuses will be popular voting to determine the recipients.
The process will be overseen by the U.S. Postal Service, with elections taking place online and with print ballots available at or through the Postal Service. This is a renewal of the Postal Service's historic mission of sustaining independent and competitive journalism--a mission initiated by the founders of the American experiment and encouraged by their successors well into the 20th century.
There will be no content supervision by the government, no monitoring content to ascertain that it is "good journalism," or even journalism at all. The stipulations above will go a long way toward eliminating fraud. And if people elect to have disingenuous local news media? Just like elections in general, that is the possibility in a democracy.
The ultimate goal of the LJI is not simply to equal the optimum performance of the U.S. press system through history but to surpass it. Even at its best, U.S. journalism has reflected the view of large property owners and the well-to-do, and left dispossessed communities underserved, especially communities of color. One almost certain positive development from the LJI will be that communities of color across the nation will be in a position to have local news media that actually cover the issues in their neighborhoods, towns and cities seriously and thoroughly, produced by journalists from those communities. The LJI makes real a fundamental civil right, one at the heart of the American experiment: the right to a free press that gives everyone the information they need to make real the promise of democracy.
The immediate beneficiaries of the LJI will be the numerous local nonprofit news media that have already been formed, often by working journalists, in communities around the nation over the past decade. The LJI will prove to be an oasis for them. It will also make it practical for local journalists to take over dying local news media and convert them to nonprofit status. This is already happening in communities across the country, but often with much difficulty. The LJI would provide encouragement and support for journalists and their communities.
In big cities where historic daily newspapers are struggling to survive, and in smaller towns where weekly papers are shadows of their former selves, LJI could help local journalists and editors buy, sustain and reinvent publications that have withered under chain ownership.
Maintaining an existing publication, which has name recognition and contacts in the community, gives journalists a jumpstart. But they won't have so much of an advantage that other journalists cannot start competing publications. Indeed, we believe that, in short order, there will likely be a body of new non-profit news media engaged in generating local journalism and seeking LJI funds. This is the goal of the LJI.
The LJI is not hostile to the remaining for-profit local news media. We recognize how important it is to stop the bleeding in for-profit newsrooms, even as we build a necessary and more viable noncommercial system. To help make the transition, in its first six years (two terms) of existence, the LJI would allow local for-profit news media to compete for LJI funding in their county elections, providing they set up distinct nonprofit branches and use their LJI funding under the exact same terms as nonprofit LJI recipients. All remaining local for-profit newspapers and news sites are desperately searching for a workable business model, and if this grants them a lifeline to find a new way to operate in the black doing journalism, more power to them. And if profitability eludes them, they will be better positioned to transition to nonprofit status.
After the first six years, commercial news outlets--whether they are legacy media or startups--would close their nonprofit arms and become ineligible for LJI funding, unless they convert to full nonprofit status. This proposal has no interest in creating an army of investors and commercial lobbyists preying permanently on the government to bankroll their ventures.
At any rate, the right for anyone to launch their own news medium, commercial or otherwise, at any time will always be inviolate. Indeed, we can imagine how commercial news media could thrive alongside nonprofit journalism. Commercial firms, like anyone else, will always be able to publish anything produced by non-profit LJI recipients at no cost upon publication.
How much will it cost the taxpayers?
It is imperative that any system to solve the crisis must have a budget sufficient to get the job done and done well. Daily newspapers have been a massive industry in the U.S. economy until the past 15 years. The total revenues of U.S. daily newspapers constituted one percent of GDP as recently as 1960; that would amount to $232 billion in 2021. In 2000 the total revenues accounted for by daily newspapers was just under 0.6 of one percent of GDP. At that rate, the local journalism income for 2021 would be $133 billion. In 2021, the total daily newspaper revenues (including digital) will be less than $20 billion, and every year that number continues to decrease.
So providing the nation with a credible free press costs money, but, thanks to immense cost savings provided by the digital revolution, and being nonprofit, we do not need hundreds of billions of dollars. But we do need tens of billions, because the single most important and indispensable element of journalism remains skilled human labor, in competing newsrooms.
There actually is historical precedent. For much of the 19th century, when nearly all newspapers were delivered well below actual cost by the Post Office, the value of the postal subsidy, according to an 1840s government audit, effectively equaled 0.21 of one percent of GDP, which would amount to over $46 billion in 2021.
To be effective, the LJI would require an annual budget in this range. The best way to do that would be to set the annual budget at 0.15 of one percent of the previous year's GDP. Keeping the budget to this formula would account for economic and population growth, as well as inflation in coming years, and provide stability for planning. So for 2022 the budget would be just over $34 billion. After initial set-up and administration costs, that would leave at least $33.5 billion to go directly toward local news production.
The LJI funds would be distributed at the same rate for every person, so a county's LJI budget would be determined exclusively by its population. An annual budget of $33.5 billion divided by the US population of 333 million people, equals roughly $100 per capita. Therefore, a county of 250,000 people would get $25 million to produce and sustain local journalism. A county of 1 million people would get $100 million.
If people elect not to vote, the amount of the budget is not affected; it only means that fewer people would determine where the money goes.
The response of many when presented with a proposed budget like this is sticker shock, followed by "the cost is too high." The correct response, the one that guided our Founders, is what will the cost be if we don't do it? We can see signs all around us of what that looks like. We can no more lowball having a credible press system as our democracy crumbles than we would lowball military spending in the midst of a foreign invasion. The expenditure we propose is just over 4 percent of the annual cost of maintaining the military-industrial complex.
What are the upsides to this proposed solution?
There remains much to flesh out to make the LJI practical, and any plan must be flexible enough to account for unanticipated problems and issues. But there are some current institutions that will immediately benefit, and a few are are worth noting.
Local PBS, NPR and community media services present a special case for the LJI. The stations all do a variety of programming where journalism is generally a small percentage of the programming produced. Indeed, on these local stations, the journalism that is broadcast tends to be national in character, as opposed to local. LJI support seems appropriate, because it will create more local journalism where little or none existed before.
Therefore, local NPR, PBS and community stations can compete for and receive LJI funding, but it must go to dedicated journalism that is specifically within the home counties of the stations--in other words toward journalism they are not doing much of at present--and it must meet all of the LJI criteria otherwise. Public media will retain its existing budget allocation separate and apart from this legislation. The LJI is a tool for enhancing, as opposed to replacing, existing sources of public funding.
Likewise, there are numerous high schools, colleges and universities with student news media and, often, formal journalism education and departments. These programs are often filled with students eager to enter the field and make their mark, but they have nowhere to get gainful employment. The programs are floundering as the profession of journalism disappears. Now these programs and these students, of which there remain tens of thousands of optimistic participants every year, will have an important purpose again and an institutional basis for existence, much like schools of education.
Then there is Big Tech. Facebook, Google and other Internet platforms have become the main purveyors of journalism to people in the United States. This has led to considerable controversy over these companies' political power and their editorial judgment. With the LJI, Internet platforms will have popularly approved authentic local media to distribute in counties across the United States. The Internet platforms need simply acknowledge the popular news media choices in the counties people reside. This would seem to be in their own best interest. This also means the news produced through the LJI project can become ubiquitous in short order. Think of how Google search was able to help put Wikipedia on the map overnight.
The LJI also will offer philanthropists and foundations a way to effectively promote journalism at the local level. For the past 20 years, the philanthropic community has spent a good deal of money attempting to build up nonprofit journalism all across the nation. Most of these ventures have stagnated or failed because philanthropies seek to launch ventures but are in no position to support them in perpetuity. Now a philanthropy can give a two- or three-year grant to get a local newsroom up and running and, if it is well received, the LJI funds can kick in and take over thereafter.
One built-in outcome of the LJI is that it will result in several well-funded journalism outlets in each community, as had been the case for much of American history. By the final decade of the 20th century, this grand tradition of journalists competing to get stories, and to provide distinctive takes on the news, was deep in history's rear-view mirror. One-newspaper towns--with the newspapers increasingly owned by large chains with no particular interest in the community or in journalism--were the order of the day in all but a handful of communities. The LJI will allow for a renewal of the diversity and competitive vigor that is essential for a muscular free press.
We offer this proposal in order to jumpstart a policy debate that is desperately needed. There is no time to lose. To read a longer version of this proposal that includes citations as well as much more material on media economics, the history of journalism, the Constitution and the free press, and important international comparisons, please click here.
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